More "happy talk" on the DoD blogger’s roundtable - the Ft. Bragg barracks problem Posted by: McQ
on Wednesday, April 30, 2008
The title, of course, refers to Oliver Willis' uninformed assumption that only right-wing bloggers are allowed on the DoD's blogger's roundtable and that all we hear is "happy talk". Of course neither of those assumptions is true, but the one I participated in yesterday was far from anything which could be characterized as "happy talk".
You remember this video of the barracks at Ft. Bragg that I commented on last week.
Well, yesterday I got an opportunity to talk with BG Dennis Rogers, deputy director of operations and facilities for Installation Management Command, and also Command Sergeant Major Debra Strickland, command sergeant major for Installation Management Command.
To make it a little clearer, IMC is in charge of all of the facilities on Army installations. That would include the barrack in question.
Both the general and CSM went through fairly lengthy opening statements which I can summarize as "there's no excuse, we let our side down, we take responsiblity, a failure of the chain of command, but here are the details."
I got to ask my questions or, voice my concerns if you will, late in the conversation as most of those who had gone before me (such as John Donovan, Matt "Blackfive" Burden and others) had covered most of the controversy. But listening intently I heard some stuff that still didn't satisfy me, and regardless wanted the opportunity to express my disappointment to those who needed to understand it and could actually do something about it. Below is my portion of the Q&A. You can read the whole transcript here. All of this was done while holding on to a cell phone while driving through Atlanta traffic - isn't technology wonderful?
MS. DINKLANGE: Great. Bruce, from qando.net, are you still on the line? Do you have a question?
Q Yes, I am. Bruce McQuain, with qando.net.
I have to admit, I saw that in video and I was infuriated. I mean, there's no question about that. In my experience in the military, it's not the combat tours, and it's not some of the other things that we do daily that run people off, it's stuff like that.
And so, I've listened to most of the folks here talking, asking most of the questions, but I'm a little - I'd like a little clarity on something.
The — you were - Sergeant-Major, you stated there was a Garrison unit in there, prior to this Infantry unit coming back, and -
SGT. MAJ. STRICKLAND: Yes, Garrison Support unit - a reserve unit that was wrapping up their time there, yes.
Q Well, my question is, unless there was something that - dramatic that happened, they lived in the same conditions, didn't they?
SGT. MAJ. STRICKLAND: They did. But the barracks overall was in - if you haven't walked through them, it's kind of hard to, kind of, call it. I was actually on Fort Bragg about 16 months ago, and I was in those barracks. I would tell you that they were - some of them were appalling. Part of that, because they hadn't had systems addressed in awhile.
So, we pushed money into those. They were - they were under our program. And it allowed us to address the HVAC system and to do some cosmetic repairs. Whenever —
Q Yeah, I —
SGT. MAJ. STRICKLAND: Sorry?
Q I was going to say, yeah, I served in those barracks. I remember them quite well. But, I guess my point is, this wasn't a problem that just suddenly cropped up, obviously - if somebody else was living in there, and that, and then the condition of the — so, I assume - and this is what I get out of what you said, that there are now different processes in place to make sure that this doesn't happen again?
SGT. MAJ. STRICKLAND: Well, I wouldn't call it different processes.
We have reenergized, I believe, the leadership's responsibility, and their role in ensuring that our soldiers are treated appropriately, and that we - that we stay engaged in the barracks.
What happened here was the departure of one unit, and then the advancement - or the advanced return of another. Now, they were living on the edge to begin with. But they were living on the edge - meaning the Rear Detachment and the Garrison, about getting those barracks back up to speed, because they were focused on some others that had more serious problems.
So, when everybody rolled in and tried to solve that, in the space of a short period of time, they couldn't be as certain. You know, when you - when you looked at the flooded area that the soldier was in the latrine —
Q Right.
SGT. MAJ. STRICKLAND: — I think the General told you that that occurred after the barracks was reoccupied. They did go through, and they flushed all the toilets, and did all the maintenance checks that would give them some feeling that things - the systems should be functioning properly. What they couldn't replicate, and what didn't happen, was that we didn't flush them all at the same time. So you have everybody back in the barracks, and now we've got three floors worth of soldiers, all of them using their latrine facilitates, and it caused the pipe to rupture. So that happened after they were back in there.
The peeling paint, that's problematic and none of us are proud of that. But it wasn't considered a life - health and safety problem, so it didn't have the same priority as systems were.
And so when you added all those things together, it looked like we totally neglected the soldiers, and you draw this conclusion off that. Nobody wants to try to piecemeal an answer to you to try to make it sound better. But whenever I say systems in place, the only new thing, truthfully, besides the fact that everyone will be watching what happens the next return — I mean, every now and then we get a lesson — is that we establish this NCO forum.
The boss has directed that so that we can work off of more than just statistical input, which is what we get from the garrisons that roll up to the systems that tell us the status of our barracks — the status of any building.
What we have now is the NCO forum, and so the garrison CSM is going to make a statement in front of his peers on a monthly basis, which will — (background noise) — General Wilson, that will let him speak from his gut that says, "I was in those barracks," the ones that you speak of right now, "and I don't care if it has a green rating that says it's ready for reoccupancy. It didn't look right to me."
And then that will be provided to our senior leadership to make some decisions on before we continue to have soldiers come back here. And believe what I would tell you, and you have to feel it in your soul is not true, is that the NCOs and the officers in their team do not pay attention to them or care enough about their living circumstances. That's not accurate.
Q I wouldn't suggest that it was. No, obviously something broke down somewhere. That's what I'm trying to get to. But one follow-up question.
The paint peeling was bad and the flooding of the latrine was bad. But I was actually more concerned about all the mold I saw in those pictures.
SGT. MAJ. STRICKLAND: You know, I can't really — I don't know how many of those pictures — I mean, you know, we have mold in all of our family housing, Mr. McQuain. That — please let me take that back. There are different degrees of experiences with mold, and in the Southeast it's always a problem. So I saw the same video. I saw the same pictures. What I don't know is how large that problem was.
And Sergeant-Major Sheehan, who's the garrison sergeant major down there at Fort Bragg, she had been very engaged all of last week. We've been on the phone a number of times. But I never asked how widespread the mold problem was. So, now, if that started from an area that was kind of closed off, I couldn't really determine if it was in a hallway or if it was in the bathroom, which is where, you know, I suspect that it might have been connected to.
I agree with you; mold is a tough thing. But we bring in — you know, we bring in professionals who do the air quality just to make sure we're not exposing our soldiers to problem areas with mold. And then we start to repair it. So what we didn't do is make it all look acceptable or make it all be acceptable before they got there, intending to cover all that as we worked our way through.
So I know that's not a great answer. It is what happened. And I understand your cause for concern about the mold, but I'm not real clear that it was a huge problem in the barracks, just probably a persistent one that they have down in the Southeast.
GEN. ROGERS: Yeah, and this is General Rogers. I would say the same thing, Mr. McQuain. The leadership in the Southeast, really around the military, understands that mold conditions are going to exist and we have to attack it and we have to have a remediation procedure for that. Some installations actually have contracts with corporations on a constant basis.
When they identify something that looks like mold growing, they get that contractor in. And it's a constant contract that is active.
So what we have been — what has been reported from those particular barracks here in the last couple of days is that that has been repaired. So we are very concerned when we see mold because of all the other things that it brings with it and the conditions that could impact on soldiers. So thank you for that update.
Q Well, I wanted to say thank you to both of you for your sitting down with us and clarifying all this as well.
Now I wasn't completely satisfied at all with some of the answers given. Unfortunately we were running out of time and you have to give the other folks a chance to participate and ask their questions. And I did, in fact, appreciate both of them coming on and talking to us about this.
But, for instance, when CSM Strickland answered my question about "new processes" in place to preclude this sort of thing happening again I didn't get a warm fuzzy.
She said:
We have reenergized, I believe, the leadership's responsibility, and their role in ensuring that our soldiers are treated appropriately, and that we - that we stay engaged in the barracks.
Now this is just me talking, but leadership shouldn't have to be "reenergized" in this regard. Maybe I'm old school, but ensuring my soldiers "are treated appropriately" was never something I or any of my peers needed 'reenergizing' about. This shouldn't be something that requires increased command visibility, this is something that should always be of the highest visibility to all commanders all the time.
As you'll see in the transcript, they have, in fact, put some new things in place to try to ensure a reoccurrence doesn't take place, but still, as I noted, there was already a unit living in that barrack prior to the arrival of the infantry unit. If that barrack was "unacceptable" for the infantry troops, why was it apparently acceptable for the reserve unit? That went, essentially, unanswered.
The mold problem, in my view, is probably the most serious problem. And while the CSM tried to downplay the concern, I wasn't buying ... and again, given the time constraint, wasn't able to really push the subject. And again, I wondered, what in the world was that reserve unit doing billeted in that mess.
I understood the point about the pipe breaking which led to the flooding in the latrine. And the CSM said they had zeroed in on why that happened and how they'll modify future checks to try to ensure it doesn't happen again. And while peeling paint is a problem and possible health hazard (50's era barracks painted well before there was any prohibition against lead based paint), the mold concerned me the most.
Of course, with a presidential race going on, we now have this turning into a political event:
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton said in an interview Tuesday that she will call for a congressional hearing in response to an online video that shows poor living conditions at barracks on Fort Bragg.
The Fayetteville Observer first reported Friday that Ed Frawley, the father of an 82nd Airborne soldier, uploaded a video to YouTube showing peeling paint, exposed pipes, mildewed ceilings and showers, a broken toilet seat and a bathroom floor covered in sewage because of a clogged drain. Since last week, the video has logged more than 91,000 views on YouTube.
In a phone interview Tuesday afternoon with the Observer, Clinton said from Indiana that she asked Democratic Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, to hold a hearing on Fort Bragg’s barracks and the broader issue of the conditions troops are returning to on installations across the country.
“Something went terribly wrong here,” said Clinton, who is a member of the Armed Services Committee. “We’ve asked these young soldiers to risk their lives and bear brutal living conditions ... and when they return home, the least we can do is offer them decent, clean living conditions.”
I don't disagree at all with any of her points, I'm just not sure it warrants a Congressional hearing. And if you read the article, you'll see BG Rogers quoted in there as well.
As I told BG Rogers and CSM Strickland, it isn't the combat or the long tours that run most of our soldiers off, it is things like those barracks that do it better than anything. More than anything I appreciated to opportunity to get across to them the outrage of the citizenry as to how our troops had been treated. And I got the feeling they understood that completely.
The Army is involved in a huge facilities upgrading project just about everywhere, and I appreciate the heck out of that and believe the soldiers deserve the best when it comes to their living conditions back here in the states. But as my Battalion commander with the 82nd used to say, "it only takes one 'aw, sh!t' to wipe out a 'hundred attaboys'". Let's hope this puts the IMC and everyone else involved back on the "attaboy" trail.
i have a question why is the army even in the business of permanently housing soldiers at all? they should just give all soliders a real bah and let them go out and get their own place. or they could contract out to different housing companies so the burden of maintance is on a third party company. for visiting training soldiers just put them on post hotels. having the army to maintain barracks just creates a economic caste system. the officers and senior ncos are better then you so they get houses and the lower enlisted get to live in crappy barracks 2 or 3 to a room. it also creates needless time wasting chores like cutting grass, painting etc etc. are we soldiers or are we carpenters and painters? all that land thats used for base housing could be turned into training areas increacing the training capacity of the army. the army should be focusing on soldiering skills not having to be landlords.
Because the barracks are paid for very quickly when the amount of BEQ necessary to do that is compared against them.
There’s also a readiness requirement for many units - the 82nd, for instance, maintains a QRF company, on a rotating basis, which is locked down in their barracks and must be ready to go wheels-up within 3 hours of notification. I’m not sure how you do that without having an existing barrack in which most of the company already lives and in which most of that company’s equipment is stored.
Lastly, these barracks also contain company headquarters, weapons and equipment storage areas and platoon/squad training areas. The barrack portion is probably the cheapest part of all of that to build and maintain, and, even without barracks, buildings to house the mentioned functions would have to be built. They call ’em barracks but they are, in reality, multi-function buildings.
I had occasion to visit Ft Meade and Ft Lee, both in the early 70’s. The section of barracks our group whioe at Meade was was older, and hadn’t been used in a while. (To date it, I have memories of "riders on the storm" being the hot single that week... and to match the mood, it rained all damned week)
One got the decided impression they’d not been used for a while at least. The urinal in the place, as we found out with some wet feet, had a bit of brass piping missing in the drain line. Lead paint of course was there, and dust. We couldn’t do much about the paint or the pipe, but we were able to clean the place up fairly well with a 40 man afternoon effort and a few dozen bottles of bleach, which seemed to do fairly well with the mold, too, as we found. Stayed for a week in each location. Worth every penny we paid for it, though, so what the hell.
Based on this experience I have but one observation; I was of the perhaps mistaken impression that the people living there, were responsible for the basic cleanliness of the place, (Certainly, that was the case in those older buildings where actual soldiers were housed, at Meade when we visted) but they didn’t seem to have gone so far in what we saw in the vid. Why was the mold situation so bad in the place in the vid? Were the people who were there unable to keep the place clean themselves? Or was the maid not doing her job?
Based on this experience I have but one observation; I was of the perhaps mistaken impression that the people living there, were responsible for the basic cleanliness of the place, (Certainly, that was the case in those older buildings where actual soldiers were housed, at Meade when we visted) but they didn’t seem to have gone so far in what we saw in the vid. Why was the mold situation so bad in the place in the vid? Were the people who were there unable to keep the place clean themselves? Or was the maid not doing her job?
There are certain things you can do and others you can’t. The things you saw fall far outside the routine maintenance you talk about (you can’t cap sewer pipes, and they really don’t have the safetly equipment with which to scrape lead based paint or attack the mold). Yes, they are responsible for keeping a certain level of cleanliness, but, given how mold is almost treated as a biohazard complete with hazmat suits used to clear it, that was far above anything they should be tackling.
And that was my point to the CSM ... if this barracks was so awful that the infantry unit should never have been housed there, why in the world was anyone housed there previously?
given how mold is almost treated as a biohazard complete with hazmat suits used to clear it, that was far above anything they should be tackling.
Well, perhaps this is a larger point, that I’ve swerved into, then;
The difference, then to now, is how we treat things from a legal standpoint. I suppose that conversation to encompass far more than the military, but it strikes me as interesting nevertheless. I mean, in the example I cited, we’re a bunch of teens to 20 somethings, what do we know? And certainly none of the regulations about such matters was written, yet. So, we dove in and cleaned it up. Did pretty well, too. Got a nice note from the base commander about how we’d left the place better than we’d found it, and we were welcome back anytime because of that. Very pleased, he was. And we apparently took no harm from it. Far as I know,the whole group is still alive. I make no heroic comparisons, here. Noting at all unusual about it at the time, far as we knew, past the commanders note.
Today, you need to call in the federal hazmat team and get 47 environmental forms signed off on, and Al Gore to make the sign of Gaia over the site before you can respond to an issue. Even then yu stand the risk of a lawsuit by someone figuring to make a buck off the system. Can our new attitude on such matters be part of the problem, I wonder?
Wasn’t one of my (spit!) Senators, Boxer or Feinstein, on a Senate committee that is supposed to oversee military housing? Or maybe it was the VA hospital system?
"there’s no excuse, we let our side down, we take responsiblity..."
I seem to have that ’I take full responsibility’ sh** quite a lot in the last few years, from a lot of different sources. I will believe it when someone actually pays a price for scr*wups like this.
" "new processes" in place to preclude this sort of thing happening again"
Horse hockey. It ain’t the process, it’s the person who mucks up. I am extremely tired of all the ’broken system’ excuses, which serve only to enable the folks in charge to avoid any real repercussions.
"We have reenergized, I believe, the leadership’s responsibility,.."
"reenergized"??? Just what the f*** does that mean in English? Unless she was referring to the repeated application of a cattle prod to various sensitive areas of the body, this is just more bureaucratic (dare I say ’lifer’?) BS.
"what in the world was that reserve unit doing billeted in that mess."
To me, that is prima facie evidence of dereliction of duty. This was not, obviously, an isolated incident, which answers one of my questions from the previous post.
**************************** "it also creates needless time wasting chores like cutting grass, painting etc etc."
Combat units (infantry, artillery, armor) can’t train all the time. Infantry units especially, since they have more manpower (or should I say personnel?), have a lot of man-hours (oops, again) to fill, and chores like this fill the time and keep the troops busy. Idle hands are the devil’s workshop, dontcha know. It is also cheaper and more secure than hiring civilians to do the work. As the saying goes, ’It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it’. On the positive side, look upon it as acquiring useful skills for civilian life.
"I’m just not sure it warrants a Congressional hearing"
You obviously have more faith in the military bureaucracy than I do. As odious as Congressional hearings are, how else does one get information out in the open and kick the military bureaucrats’ posteriors to get them moving? Like any other organization, left to its own devices the military will conceal problems and bad news, allow problems to fester and go unresolved, and generally engage in self-serving behavior.
If the troops in the building previously were transitional... guard units... that would explain a lot of why it was "okay" for them and not "okay" for the regular army getting back from Iraq.
It also explains the Walter Reed fiasco.
It also explains why I never made any official complaint or told anyone who mattered that my matress in Biloxi had bedbugs.
It has to do with responsibility and chain of command dynamics... it’s only *my* problem if it’s actually *my* problem. And since tech school is only 9 weeks and I’m rather stressed and rather busy fighting with the idiot trying to screw up my impending PCS to Clark... those needing to know about bedbugs don’t get told.
I trust neither. Nor would I trust a Republican Congress. It’s a checks and balances, lesser of evils thing. Having Congressional hearings is probably marginally more effective at exposing and solving problems than leaving it solely in the hands of any one bureaucracy, military or civilian.
"If the troops in the building previously were transitional... guard units... that would explain a lot of why it was "okay" for them and not "okay" for the regular army getting back from Iraq."
That may explain the lack of complaints, but it does not explain the failure of the chain-of-command to do its job. There are folks whose full time job it is to inspect the facilities and ensure they meet specs. There are also annual CMMIs (Command Maintainance Management Inspection), and AGIs (Adjutant General’s Inspection) which put the fear of G*d into commanders. Failure of these inspections frequently leads to relieving the commander and shortening his/her career. I think such action would be appropriate here, it is just unclear how far up the chain the problem goes. I hear that competition for promotion is pretty intense, and this seems to be as good a reason as any to relieve some of that tension.
I trust neither. Nor would I trust a Republican Congress. It’s a checks and balances, lesser of evils thing. Having Congressional hearings is probably marginally more effective at exposing and solving problems than leaving it solely in the hands of any one bureaucracy, military or civilian.
My comment was intended as a light snark, but frankly, this has me concerned.
Congressional Democrats have a history of, in my lifetime, using such events, as props for elections, and then ignoring it all once the elections are through. More recently such nonsense is used as a tool to dismantle the Military, and frankly, given the only place they don’t like green is the Military, I have to wonder if this wouldn’t get used as just another wedge to toss out against the WOT.
